In the Time of the Americans Read online

  Henry James, the master of the American novel, who returned to the United States in 1904 for the first time in more than twenty years, visited Ellis Island and watched the immigrants being processed (“marshalled, herded, divided, subdivided, sorted, sifted, searched, fumigated”). He pictured this “visible act of ingurgitation” by American society as a sort of milling machine in which Europeans were fed in at one end and would emerge, a generation later, as Americans.

  Meanwhile they lived in the slums of the big cities, where swarms of them huddled for the moment in tenements whose metal fire-escape stairs, deplored by Henry James for their lack of architecture, made the streets look like a “spaciously organized cage for the nimbler class of animals in some great zoological garden.” But for them it was no cage; Europe was the cage, and they had been let out of it.

  TO ACHIEVE NATIONHOOD—and the United States was moving close to that, but was not yet there—America had not only to convert the European immigrants into Americans, but also to persuade Americans that they were not, in the first instance, westerners, southerners, middle westerners, or easterners. Regionalism had nearly destroyed the United States in the nineteenth century, and had to be overcome.

  The Union victory in the Civil War was only a step in the direction of bringing the country together. The revolutionary changes in American life after the Civil War were further steps in the same direction. None was of more importance than that announced in the first guidebook to the United States, published in 1893 by the German firm of Baedeker: “The United States now contain about 170,000 M. of railway, or nearly as much as all the rest of the world put together.”

  This immense and pervasive network held the country in its tight embrace, binding it together. The new transportation system linked all parts of the United States, and the new communications media—the telegraph and the infant telephone—did, too. So did national publications such as McCall’s magazine, profiting from the new phenomenon of mass literacy.

  Yet the differences in political life in the United States still fell largely along sectional lines, and in that sense the United States fell short of achieving nationhood; here, too, turn-of-the-century America was a country in transition. The South, the East, the Middle West (beginning at the Allegheny Mountains, and therefore including western Pennsylvania), and the lands west of the Mississippi were in some ways almost as different from one another as four countries.

  The South lay in ruin from the Civil War, its agriculture in decay and its mansions crumbling into dust. Henry James, visiting in 1905, remarked on the enormity of it: “The collapse of the old order, the humiliation of defeat, the bereavement and bankruptcy involved, represented, with its obscure miseries and tragedies, the social revolution the most unrecorded and undepicted, in proportion to its magnitude, that ever was.…” Asking how, in a great and complex society, “can everything so have gone?” and “Had the only focus of life then been Slavery?” he found himself driven toward the conclusion that it had been: that the antebellum South, with the single-mindedness of the mad, had indeed bet everything on that one losing card.

  Bitterly, the South at the turn of the century continued to look backward, taking ever stronger measures, legal and illegal, against its black population. In presidential elections it regularly voted for the Democrats, who normally lost. It offered no national leadership because its vision and its aspirations were irrelevant to those of the rest of the country. It had a basis for common action only with the West; both regions were rural and poor, and their white populations largely were of native Anglo-Saxon Protestant stock.

  In terms of square miles, most of the United States lay west of the Mississippi River. But the West was sparsely populated, so it did not play a role proportioned to its size in electing congressmen or presidents. Besides, in 1900 Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma had not yet been admitted to statehood, and accordingly sent no congressmen or senators to Washington. Then, too, the West was poor. It had its financial centers, but essentially it was peopled by ranchers, farmers, prospectors, miners, traders, and shopkeepers: borrowers, not lenders.

  William Jennings Bryan, the populist, Bible-quoting orator from the prairies, brought the West and the South together in his three losing campaigns as Democratic candidate for the presidency (1896, 1900, and 1908). He appealed both to the economic interests the two regions had in common by championing small-town and farm debtors against the eastern banks, and to the social, ethnic, and religious background they shared as rural, white native Anglo-Saxon Protestants; so that he drew support, though for different reasons, at the start of his career from liberals and at the end of it, in the 1920s, from the Ku Klux Klan. Although celebrated as a public speaker, he appealed to the voters most strongly on ethnic, religious, and sectional issues that were unarticulated. Thus his advocacy of Prohibition, then one of the important issues in American politics, united rural, native-born Anglo-Saxon Protestants against such new immigrants as the wine-drinking Italian Catholics who swarmed into the slums of the big industrial cities.

  While Bryan’s choice of issues was divisive, his campaigning had the unifying effect of transforming the whole country into one forum: he ushered in modern politics by going out to all parts of the United States to meet the people. His 1896 campaign was the first time that a presidential candidate had traveled extensively and orated to the crowds from trains. He traveled 18,000 miles, spoke an average of 60,000 to 100,000 words every day, and addressed more than 5 million people.

  THE EAST AND THE MIDDLE WEST, the one-sixth of the country that held nearly half its population, the heartland of the Union in the Civil War and the center of American wealth, minerals, manufacturing, and finance, were linked by politics but divided by geography and economics—and also by outlook, for east of the Allegheny mountain range, Americans looked across the ocean to Europe, while Americans west of the mountains did not.

  America’s largest industry, wholesale slaughtering and meat packing, was centered in the middle western metropolis of Chicago. The mineral wealth of the country and the steel and other industries upon which it was based were also to be found in the Middle West. At the turn of the century, Pennsylvania, the leading state in minerals (principally iron and coal), by itself accounted for about a third of all American minerals production; while Ohio, the original site of John D. Rockefeller’s headquarters and the center of his empire, produced about 40 percent of America’s oil.

  Finance, however, was centered along the Atlantic coast, in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City. Throughout the nineteenth century, the growth of the United States had been financed by British and continental European investors, who placed their moneys with and through the banks of the cities of the East, establishing a money power that the other sections of the country, even the wealthy Middle West, resented.

  But the East and the Middle West had in common new social and political issues that growing urbanization and industrialization brought with them, and that the South, in particular, had therefore not yet encountered: such matters as the rights of labor unions, the regulation of working conditions, the prevention of industrial violence, the growth of slums, and the widening differences in wealth: on average a farm laborer in the 1900s earned $247 a year while the banker John Pierpont Morgan earned $5 million a year—and was regarded by someone really wealthy, Andrew Carnegie, as “not a rich man.”

  The flood of immigrants into the industrial cities created a political challenge the South and West had not yet experienced: for example, once popular election of senators was instituted, Roosevelt’s political partner, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, a Protestant, a man of wealth, descended from Englishmen who had settled in America centuries before, had to appeal to Boston voters who were Irish, Catholic, poor, and newly arrived.

  Republicans retained control of the two regions—and, except for the two Grover Cleveland victories, won every presidential election from 1860 to 1908—in an alliance that expressed itself as a balanced Middle West/Eas
t ticket. Typically the presidential nominee was from Ohio and the vice-presidential nominee was from New York. Thus, Ohio-born President Ulysses S. Grant and Vice President Schuyler Colfax (New York); President Rutherford B. Hayes (Ohio) and Vice President William A. Wheeler (New York); President James A. Garfield (Ohio) and Vice President Chester A. Arthur (New York); President Benjamin Harrison (Ohio) and Vice President Levi P. Morton (New York); and President William McKinley (Ohio) and Vice President Theodore Roosevelt (New York).

  Of course, it was not an even balance: in American politics the presidency is everything, the vice presidency nothing—unless the President dies in office. Garfield’s death brought the New Yorker Arthur the presidency in 1881; and in 1900, when the Republican party gave its vice-presidential nomination to New York’s governor, Theodore Roosevelt, a personality so colorful that he was widely regarded as a lunatic, Ohio political boss Mark Hanna reputedly asked fellow Republicans: “Don’t any of you realize that there’s only one life between this madman and the White House?”

  MCKINLEY, A MAJOR IN THE UNION ARMY, was the last Civil War veteran to serve as President. His Vice President, young Roosevelt, had taken no part in it, for he had been a mere two years old when the war between the states began; with his accession to high national office, the country moved another big step away from the Civil War and from the sectionalism that had given rise to it.

  The Civil War had been about the preservation of the Union. If the United States had split into rival countries, like those of Europe, they could have been expected to behave like European states: they would have fallen, in the words of Henry Adams, a historian of the early American Republic, into the “local jealousies, wars, and corruption which had made a slaughterhouse of Europe.”

  But the very purpose served by the United States was to be not like Europe. The immigration that had peopled America over the course of three centuries and that had risen to flood-tide levels by 1900 was a mass escape from Europe, while the American experiment in republican government based on a continentwide federal union was an escape from Europe’s politics. The United States was the alternative to Europe: it was in order to fulfill that role that the United States had come into being.

  IN THE 1880s, when Franklin Roosevelt and Douglas MacArthur and George Marshall were born, American history was not yet widely taught to schoolchildren. American history textbooks were not to be found in most classrooms, and the few that were available were of little value. A historian of these matters tells us that the early nineteenth-century textbooks supplied little information about “government … politics, or even … the shape of the country” and that their authors, for want of information, “tended to make things up.” It was only in the 1890s, when Dwight Eisenhower and other younger members of the generation entered elementary school, that systematic American history texts came into general use in the classroom.

  The United States that approached the turn of the century was a country on the edge, about to become conscious of its past only as it verged on moving away from it.

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  EUROPE AND US

  TO AMERICANS, wrote Henry James, “elsewhere” means Europe. In political terms, this was close to the literal truth at the time; for about a third of the human race lived in Europe and, outside the American sphere, all the rest of the earth was then dominated by Europeans. But Americans meant more than that. They meant that Europe represented what they had fled or had rebelled against. For they were starting afresh. As Henry Adams wrote, “The American stood in the world as a new order of man.”

  Characteristic of Europe’s monarchical system, as seen from this side of the Atlantic, were intrigues at court, secret treaties, and the sort of balance-of-power politics that made warfare endemic. Americans condemned these characteristics, and the system that gave them rise.

  Having settled a vast new continent that seemed boundless, Americans saw that opportunities were boundless—if human beings did not set up boundaries. With no internal frontiers or bars to trade, they prospered, and saw in this a lesson for the rest of the world. They argued that they themselves should be free to trade without hindrance anywhere in the world.

  Contrasting the accumulation of wealth arising from their productivity with the wastefulness caused by Europe’s wars and politics, Americans pictured economic activity as the alternative—the winning alternative—to war and politics; from which they later concluded that economic sanctions alone could bring an enemy to its knees.

  As Henry Adams wrote of his countrymen, “Believing that in the long run interest, not violence, would rule the world … they were tempted to look upon war and preparations for war as the worst of blunders; for they were sure that every dollar capitalized in industry was a means of overthrowing their enemies more effective than a thousand dollars spent on frigates and standing armies. The success of the American system was, from this point of view, a matter of economy. If they could relieve themselves from debts, taxes, armies, and government interference with industry, they must succeed in outstripping Europe.…”

  Americans did not recognize how British they were. They were like children who think themselves completely unlike their parents, though any outsider can see the family resemblance at a glance. There was, in the American view, an ocean of difference between the former colonies and their mother country; but to continental Europeans, what was striking was that Americans and Britons, in many senses, spoke the same language.

  It is true that the colonies of the New World rebelled against England and fought for and won the right to go their own way. But even in revolting against British rule, American leaders were inspired by political principles and theories embodied in a British literature that stretched from the Magna Carta to the writings of John Locke; and having achieved their independence, they wrote a constitution for themselves heavily influenced by Montesquieu’s theory of how Britain was governed. And they chose to continue being governed by British common law.

  In seeking independence, their only enemy had been Great Britain. Thereafter, all they sought was freedom to trade around the globe; and wherever they found themselves shut out, it seemed to be the British who closed the door. They were so much alike that they always competed. Americans almost invariably discovered that their rival in manufacturing, in shipping, and in trading was Britain.

  Yet it was the British upon whom Americans, especially New Englanders such as the Adams set, modeled themselves. Adams’s pupil Henry Cabot Lodge went further: he admired England so much that he envied her and wished to take her place in the world. He believed British “stock” to be the world’s superior race, but the American branch of it to be superior to the native variety. He was the same coin of which Anglophile and Anglophobe were the two sides.

  So America continued to define herself in world affairs in terms of her political birth: her Declaration of Independence in 1776. More than a century later her foreign policy still was that of the Fourth of July. She had one basic political principle: that governments in Europe should not rule territories across the water. She had one basic economic principle: that all waters and lands around the globe should be open to her merchants. And in both her political and economic principles, she was brought back to having as her prime enemy Great Britain.

  In the days when Henry Adams’s grandfather John Quincy Adams had been secretary of state, the most astute American leaders saw that, nonetheless, Britain actually protected the United States. Her navies, which controlled the Atlantic and the Pacific, kept the other European powers, who were England’s rivals, away from the shores of the Americas. John Quincy Adams, observing that it was not from love of the United States, but because her own interests required her to protect the Americas, that Britain performed this service, decided that America owed her nothing in return—not even an alliance to help England carry her policy into effect. This nineteenth-century New England policy of pursuing a rivalry with England while consciously relying on her protection was an intellectual inheritance, handed do
wn to Henry Adams, Adams’s pupil Cabot Lodge, and Lodge’s young colleague Theodore Roosevelt. Most other Americans gave no thought to the question of how it happened that the United States was so secure against attack; those who did put it down to their country’s moral superiority.

  Should America venture forth to fight for democracy abroad? or for other colonies seeking to throw off the yoke of their mother countries? Despite the generous inclinations of some in the Revolutionary generation, the answer of many in their time and thereafter was negative. In the words of John Quincy Adams, America “is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

  Americans could show themselves to be “true friends of mankind,” advised President Washington, not by taking part in world politics but “by making their country not only the asylum for the oppressed of every nation, but a desirable residence for the virtuous and industrious of every country.” The United States, in other words, should not participate in European politics, should not try to challenge or change Europe, but should instead provide an alternative to Europe.

  So well did the United States succeed that by the 1880s and 1890s and 1900s, millions and millions more Europeans were streaming across the Atlantic each year to become Americans. But as the United States increased in size, population, and wealth at the turn of the century, Americans like young Theodore Roosevelt and his friends longed to have their country play a great role in world affairs. They questioned the deeply held feeling in America, especially west of the Alleghenies, that becoming entangled in Europe’s politics, or the world politics that Europe controlled, was dangerous.

  THE AMERICAN FEAR of being corrupted by involvement in Europe’s affairs was most memorably expressed not in a speech or in a state paper, but in a novelette; and though it came from the pen of Henry James, the master of the American novel, it was a slight work, by no means one of his substantial creations.